The Daily Telegraph has posted a review of Russell Kane’s series of programs about Evelyn Waugh and his works. (See earlier posts.) This is by Jane Shilling, but it is not clear whether she has seen the entire series. Here are the opening paragraphs:
It is almost 60 years since the novelist Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Day 1966, and the comedian Russell Kane is marking the anniversary with a Radio 4 series, Waugh, What Is He Good For?
Starting today, Kane explores the themes of Waugh’s major novels, from Decline and Fall to the Sword of Honour trilogy. It is not the first time that the comedian has championed his literary hero. He chose Waugh as his specialist subject for Celebrity Mastermind – and won (joking that for true authenticity he should have come a poor third, echoing Waugh’s Oxford degree).
He argued the novelist’s case in Radio 4’s Great Lives, and in his series Evil Genius he attempted to defend Waugh against the preconceptions (or in one case complete ignorance) of three fellow comedians, two of whom knew his writing only from the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited – a work about, as one puts it: “Toffs with problems they don’t want to talk about.”
In his exposition of what Waugh is good for, Kane has consistently taken the pure (and intrepidly retro) academic position of separating the writing from the writer, summarising him in Evil Genius as a “grumpy, drunken, elitist bore who wrote the most beautiful, exquisite, pared-down prose that could go right to the heart of emotional delinquency in people.”
It is a distinction that escaped the presenter of Great Lives, the journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris, who complained that Waugh “doesn’t seem a very nice man”, expressing his preference for novelists whose company he thought he might have enjoyed, such as Jane Austen or George Eliot…
The full review (entitled “Are we too woke for Evelyn Waugh?”) is currently posted by Yahoo (linked here) but you might not want to wait too long to connect if you want to read it.
